This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Friday, September 27, 2013

My last post on the demolition of French churches added to a sense of Millennial malaise this week. It came jumbled together on the micro and macro levels. A friend called to complain about a week of rude people and worse - people who are post-rude - who never knew what social conventions they violated in the first place. Another friend sent a link to a Gawkerstory about,

David Gilmour, the University of Toronto English professor who told a female reporter that he is "not interested in teaching books by women." "What I teach is guys," Gilmour continued. "Serious heterosexual guys."

A news story in a nearby town reported on a pregnant woman who was raped by two men on a well-traveled path behind her house, while she was walking her baby in a stroller. The baby was unharmed. And these days, that is surprising. Another local news story - in a normally low crime area - involved a girl who was almost abducted from the sidewalk by two men in a black van with darkened windows.

Some entertainment news stories, like this and this and this, further reminded me that the cultural means for digesting the real world malaise have descended into an impoverished atmosphere. After that, I came upon a 2005 rant in the Guardian by the British actor Sean Chapman, in which he bemoaned the degraded state of the film industry in the UK.
Chapman's article ran in the same vein as the post, "On Declaring Moral Bankruptcy," which described collapsing standards across several professions. Chapman's commentary reveals how the real world Millennial malaise has infected a major cultural industry; but more, he identifies a core element of that malaise: a superficial, plastic, mass-media-hyped value system which sucks quick money out of youth and denigrates tradition, care, quality and experience. Chapman also sees this value system emerging from a generational problem, as others have done. From his Guardian rant:

Today's film students often come from technical backgrounds in which the "soft" elements of storytelling are a mystery. Unless you've been in a decent rehearsal, where do you learn the craft of coaxing a leading performance? Without theatre or TV training, film students have no knowledge of how to interact creatively with actors. We must bring this into their training.

Time and again some woefully inexperienced director "helms" a poorly budgeted movie, billed by the complicit industry press as a plucky "first-timer". In practice this usually means that a desperate twentysomething directs a film for no fee, payment deferred until some chimeric profit margin is reached. An inefficient funding system consisting of international presales and ad-hoc instalment plans means that even low-budget films are made in a compromising atmosphere of constant hysteria.

Too many films in this country scramble into production on a suicidally inadequate second draft, and this recipe of low budget, inexperienced director and half-baked script is devastating. Until we regain foundation habits of teaming well-crafted screenplays with experienced directors we will never be able to build a sustainable national production base. ...

I propose packages such as a Tom Stoppard screenplay shot by Nic Roeg. Perhaps a Hanif Kureishi script in the hands of Danny Boyle or Sally Potter. Is that so impossible? Are there really no backers for options like these? We have to focus on utilising such experience while our younger film-makers serve their apprenticeships working on films of integrity.

Film-making is a hi-tech industry being run in the UK as a jumble sale. The Bafta denizens who've made fortunes out of their executive posts while presiding over the collapse of the industry must invest available funds not in luncheons but in training, connecting film students with writers, actors and experienced producers, immediately.

The irony is that Chapman is famous for his role as Frank Cotton in Hellraiser (1987),
in which he played a cynical, corrupt and sadomasochistic sexual
explorer and body vampire. Chapman tapped the subliminal themes of the
real world malaise with his short performance, and has done so in subsequent roles.
It is all there: the uncaring, self-indulgent, desensitized egotist,
stabbing that vein of boundless narcissism, going past the realm of
sexual experience into ruination. Perhaps it is
because of his work in these roles that Chapman knows that the world should be a better place. The world should not be full of Frank Cottons. And Frank Cotton should not be the New Normal.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.